There’s a lot of pressure today on businesses to adopt cloud hosting for both daily office work and websites. Cloud computing means that instead of knowing exactly where your software, documents and website files are located – on a server in a building on a street in Burnaby, for example, or in Utah or Ontario – your files are distributed and accessed from computers spread around the globe.

Cloud computing is heavily marketed for the following benefits. Companies can reduce their capital costs on hardware, software and licensing fees, and owners of large corporate websites may experience faster access and streaming of their content. The financial model for web hosting shifts from a static annual or monthly charge to a pay-by-use model. The cost of software and complications of local area networks are handled by the cloud host’s data centres, rather than your company’s IT people. Cloud computing offers expanded opportunities for wireless computing: because all applications and documents are globally distributed, they can be accessed from anywhere in the world that has wireless access.

But I have a lot of concerns about cloud hosting and I’m not alone. In August, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak expressed his own concerns about cloud hosting. This is from an industry leader whose own company has been one of the most prominent in the promotion of cloud computing. And many people agree with him.

With a static server, we know where your web files are stored. There is a physical location and address. With cloud hosting, some files could be on a server in England, some in Bangladesh, some in China – wherever server space and bandwidth is available at that split second.

Cloud-hosted companies assume a greater risk as a result of the many additional resources and connections required. When data is stored on multiple servers, often spanning several countries, issues quickly arise when any particular data centre is compromised. There are also issues around standardization, since there are no proper international standards for cloud technologies at this time.

There are also — and most importantly — huge security issues. Some of our clients express concern about the Privacy Act and hosting on an American server, but cloud computing is much worse. You really have no control over your files – they could be anywhere, including most third-world countries. The development of cloud computing resources in third world countries is increasingly encouraged and supported by large Western corporations. In return, there is an exponential increase in the number of people with permission to access the passwords and firewalls, and an increase in opportunities for hackers.

A good summary of the security issues is provided by Kurt Johnson in his article, Cloud Computing Hides Big Issues in Corporate Data Sharing on forbes.com.

Long before cloud computing, companies were sharing vital information with customers, partners, vendors, and contractors to make business processes run more efficiently and economically. They started with Web commerce, then moved into mobile applications and social networking. Each new information-sharing program opened up another hole in the corporate information security armor.

Too often, without realizing it, they rely on nothing more than trust to keep their data safe. They trust that the right people have the right access to vital information and will use it for the right things, yet they don’t really know who they’re trusting because they don’t know who all of those users are. Their service provider tells them to trust that they are managing user access effectively. Trust, in this context, is a flimsy defense.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/02/17/cloud-computing-hides-big-issues-in-corporate-data-sharing/

Read more:

To Cloud or Not to Cloud – Pros and Cons
http://www.starktalent.com/tag/pros-and-cons-of-business-cloud-computing/

The Cloud and Africa: Indicators for the Growth of Cloud Computing
http://theafricanfile.com/ict/the-cloud-and-africa-indicators-for-growth-of-cloud-computing/

Cloud Computing: The Business Persepctive
http://www.acc.ncku.edu.tw – PDF

Cloud Computing Pros and Cons
http://epiclaunch.com/cloud-computing-pros-and-cons/

Cloud Computing Pros and Cons for Small Biz
http://www.cloudproviderusa.com/cloud-computing-pros-cons-small-biz/

Should the host for your website or blog be geographically located in Canada? A lot of people believe this is essential but it’s not. In fact, it may work against you.

This short article describes some factors to consider if you’re looking for information about having a .ca domain name, wondering about the effectiveness of a .ca name for reaching Canadian consumers, wishing to support Canadian companies, or have privacy concerns.

Hosting is not the same thing as having a .ca name
Hosting has nothing to do with having a .ca name. You can register for a .ca name but still host outside Canada.

Having a .ca domain name is a good idea if:
• you have a service or company of interest mainly to people in Canada
• you provide services or products where Canadian branding is important
• you are not very interested in providing services outside Canada
• you have a strong reason why you want people to know your company is in Canada

You must register for a .ca name with a company in Canada that has been licensed to sell .ca names by CIRA. You must have a Canadian street address and phone. But you don’t need to host with the same company, and it may be preferable not to host in Canada.

Search engine optimization and .ca names
If you have reason to believe the majority of your market uses a Canadian search engine like Yahoo.ca, then having a .ca address may help your site come up on Canadian search engine results above sites outside Canada.

Be aware this also depends on how well your search engine optimization has been done. Proper search engine optimization using key words like Canada, Canadian, British Columbia, BC, Vancouver (or any other Canadian city) will result in similar rankings without having a .ca name. The .ca name alone is usually not sufficient.

Factors to consider when choosing a host
A host is a company that owns servers (computers) where your website files are stored. The choice of a host should be made on factors like the quality of their servers and their position on the Internet.

The majority of requests to servers in Canada are routed through the States and back again. You should think about the geographic location of your target market, and choose a host geographically located close to both your target market and the Internet backbone. A server’s proximity or “hops” to the internet backbone are equally important. A low number of hops ensures fast and efficient connections between your visitor’s computer and your server’s location.

The image above was taken from a traceroute program that connected a computer in Vancouver, BC to a host called Netfirms in Ontario. If your target market is in Vancouver BC and you host with Netfirms, your target market would have to make 15 Internet hops to reach their server (and 15 more for the files to be sent back to them). Conversely, if your clients are in BC, we can offer them a local server based in Vancouver.

Canadian hosts are not necessarily located in Canada
Many people host with companies because they advertise as Canadian companies, and people want to support businesses located in Canada. Canadian hosting companies, however, do not usually use servers in Canada. Most Canadian host companies use servers located outside Canada, usually in the UK or the States.

Popular hosts like GoDaddy.ca (Arizona), Justhost (Utah), Hostmonster (Utah) and Fat Cow (Massachusetts) spend vast amounts of money promoting themselves as Canadian web hosts but in fact their servers are geographically located in the United States, as your own files will be as well.

In addition, many Canadian hosting companies outsource their support services to other countries. So signing up for a Canadian host because they advertise “superior Canadian service” really may not be to your advantage, because the representatives may actually be in foreign countries.

Cost
We regularly see companies charge insane amounts of money for plans they call “Gold”, “Platinum”, “Advanced” or other names assigned to a “level” of service. We frequently see Canadian companies charging more than $40/month for service that should cost less than $7/month, and there is no practical reason for it.

Concerns about the Patriot Act
Many people express concerns about the Patriot Act and its implications for the content on their websites. But if the pages of your website are public, the information is available to everyone anyways. If the information on your site is private, such as information stored in a database, only citizens of the US are subject to the Patriot Act. Neither citizens of the US nor hosts in the US are required by law to give up usernames and passwords.

Concerns about privacy
People who are concerned about hosting in Canada for reasons of “privacy” on the Internet often do not realize the amount of information that is already accessible about them on servers spread across the States.

Most people use online services that store enormous amounts of history about their activities. The information you post on your Facebook account, Linked in, Twitter or any of the hundreds of other social media accounts is stored on servers in the States. It is accessed and used by companies you’ll never know about.

If you use Google docs, Flickr or Youtube, your content is on American servers. If you use Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo mail, copies of all of your emails are being stored on US servers. Credit card information for multinational corporations is routinely stored on US servers. Every time you register software or other online product, you are likely registering it on a US server. Web analytics tools like Google Analytics store your visitor information on US servers. If you belong to a professional organization, like the Kitsilano Chamber of Commerce, your membership information and event photos are likely stored on a US server (in their case, Texas). By comparison, the information on most websites is pretty innocent and, by nature, in the public domain already. 

In summary, small companies and individuals should be more concerned about the quality and qualifications of the host’s servers, getting good value for their money (shared hosting for $9.95/month or less, with no limitations on storage or bandwidth), and the host’s geographic proximity to Internet hubs.

YOU CAN BE #1 ON GOOGLE.

Maybe. A very, very, very remote maybe. And it is definitely not something that anyone can promise you. Here’s how it works.

If someone types a search term into Google and if a match for that term is found on your site, Google will continue to scan your site and evaluate more than 200 factors in less than a second.

These factors can include:
– who links to you
– what their status is (ie if a university or bank links to your site, their link will be more valuable than a link from a small company site)
– who you link to and how relevant their own content is to your content
– how long your site has been online
– if it has been sufficiently optimized with meta data for search engines during the entire time it has been online
– how much traffic your site gets compared to other sites with the same search term
– if your content contains a complex enough mix of key words and phrases
– if you have at least 250 words of content on each page, the text is not repeated elsewhere, and the phrasing is original
– if your content is completely original and can’t be found on any other site (Google can tell in a split second)
– if your site has a large number of pages with a mix of information, pictures and tables (Google likes a mix)
– if the search phrase is used a sufficient number of times throughout your website but not TOO many times
– if Google can find verification codes, xml sitemaps and analytics for your site (these are missing on most sites, which will give you an advantage if they’re done right)

And these are only 12 of 200 other factors that Google weighs in relation to the content of your site. Many are unknown and never revealed. It’s even more staggering to think that this happens in less than a second.

While Google is forming an impression of your site, they are simultaneously scanning hundreds of thousands of other sites containing the same search term for the same 200 factors – and deciding where you fit in comparison to the other sites.

Their findings are further filtered through the searcher’s geographic location. Companies with sites closest to the visitor will be displayed first. The findings are also filtered by the searcher’s own previous searches, site visits and the sites their friends and coworkers have visited (the latter depending on the masses of history Google has been collecting about their online activities for years).

Finally you have your ranking in the list. Will you come up on page one if you are high in the ranking? Probably not… the first page of Google results only has 15 places. The first 3-10 are usually a combination of paid ads and Google Places listings. Which means that the chances of your site showing in the remaining spaces on the first page – called “organic” results – were just cut in half for most search terms.

Companies that guarantee results on page 1 of Google generally use link-mining methods that Google does not approve of. “Guaranteed SEO” people sell monthly accounts. You pay them to create hundreds of back links to your site every month (link farming), which can sometimes work to temporarily put you on page 1. But Google will gradually drop your site in their ranking – or remove it – and the back links will have to be re-submitted. Which means you’ll be paying for the same work over and over.

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